The most impactful experience relating to Holocaust education is hearing survivor testimonies. Sadly, as many of our Holocaust survivors are aging and we are losing their precious presence in this world, it is time for the next generation to lift and share their voices.

In memory of Jeffrey Alan Schwartz, his brother Larry Schwartz and family have established the Jeffrey Alan Schwartz Holocaust Speakers Bureau. This newly developed program will bring second and third generation descendants of Holocaust survivors into regional private, public, and independent schools, and community clubs and organizations to keep the history, messages, and lessons of the Holocaust alive.

“The Talmud teaches that when we quote someone who has died, their lips whisper from the grave.” — Babylonian Talmud

The Greenspon Center has gotten a strong start over the past year by introducing the Heritage Testimonies® Program in partnership with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The course offered participants the opportunity to create an extensive, pedagogically appropriate presentation aimed at educating students of every age — from middle schoolers to adults.

The Greenspon Center is honored to be part of keeping the message of our community’s survivors alive for future generations, through their descendants.

For more information, or to bring a speaker to your school or community, please contact Talli Dippold, (dippoldt@queens.edu). If you would like to make a gift in support of this program, please contact Talia Goldman, goldmant@queens.edu.

No event in modern history highlights more effectively the dangers of indifference in the face of hatred and discrimination than the Holocaust. We honor those who endured one of history’s darkest eras, and we invite you to join us.

She was a young student when Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s traumatized the life of her family in Austria.

Susan Cernyak-Spatz stayed in Theresienstadt until January, 1943 when she was sent on transport “East” which by that time meant Auschwitz. Due to the fact that Auschwitz-Birkenau was a labor-cum-extermination camp, she was selected for “outside work” and managed to survive the first critical two months in which prisoners in Birkenau either survived typhus and the other many diseases running rampant in the camp or died. In the course of the two years in which she was in the camp, she learned the rules of survival which included an “inside job” to avoid the daily selections, marching to and from backbreaking outside work, or the only alternative, going into the “gas.”

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In 1944, Chenkin’s parents smuggled her outside of the ghetto in a potato sack, just weeks before thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps abroad. Chenkin’s parents were later sent to separate camps.

My story begins and ends with a prophecy uttered by my grandmother at the moment I was born. “This child,” she said, “because she was born on the first day of the Jewish New Year, will be lucky her entire life.”

Six months later the Nazis invaded Lithuania and the word “luck” disappeared for all of us Jewish people living in that country.

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